We discuss perception studies of two low level indicators of discourse phenomena by Swedish, Japanese, and Chinese native speakers. Subjects were asked to identify upcoming prosodic boundaries and disfluencies in Swedish spontaneous speech. We hypothesize that speakers of prosodically unrelated languages should be less able to predict upcoming phrase boundaries but potentially better able to id...

The present study compares two measures most frequently used to assess pragmatic competence: Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCT) and Oral Discourse Completion Tasks (ODCT). The study focuses on these two speech act data collection methods and explores the validity of using different forms of Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) in non-Western contexts. Twenty four Iranian university students...

This study was a Persian-English comparative translation investigation on the selected poems of Forough- Farrokhzad, an influential contemporary Iranian poet. Two English translations were analyzed: one by a native Persian speaker, Sholeh Wolpé, an Iranian poet and translator, and the other by a non-native Persian speaker, Jascha Kessler, an American poet, writer and translator. The trans...

the present study aims at exploring kinship terms and the different ways in which they are used to refer to and address relatives and non-relatives in hawrami, an iranian language spoken in paveh, a border city in kermanshah province. the relevant linguistic and cultural data are obtained primarily by one of the researchers as a native speaker of the dialect and through field works and intervie...

This study investigates the use of discourse markers by Spanish learners of English. It is intended as an initial contribution to the study of how discourse markers are used by foreign language learners. We conduct two pilot studies involving the use of English discourse markers by native speakers of Spanish. We first study if these speakers use English discourse markers at all in their writing...

writing projects are socially-situated identities. the rhetorically-loaded aspects of writing, like metadiscourse marking, are more prone to carry such identities. through analyzing metadiscourse strategies employment in persian and english (as the lingua franca of academic discourse community) research articles, this study makes an attempt to find out whether persian native writers take on the...